Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s fifteen years after the Great Blackout. The United States, at the very least, is entirely free of electricity for reasons as yet unknown (but it sure smells like, get this, a conspiracy!) Humans have left the cities for the countryside to live in communal villages or prey on one another. The good guys sport henleys and hoes. The bad ones also wear henleys, but they ride horses and carry swords…
Historians like to say that we can’t “go back” to the past and that certainly is true in a general sort of way. But as a matter of fact, in farming circles, we are always “going back” one way or another. In every generation there are people who decide that “going back” is a way to escape what they dislike in the present and there are a whole lot of people, now and historically, who dislike what is going on in agriculture.
As said in the introduction to this lecture held in spring 2011, Christopher Alexander has started a fire that keeps on burning, spread by the “wind” throughout the world. But in the wake of this fire there’s no ash, but only beauty and true living structure. As in the new cosmology of Alexander, matter is not inert anymore — it has spirit, revealed in the field of centers. This means that beauty is seen as a fact of the wholeness found in nature and the universe.
Daniel Suelo, 51, has spent the morning gorging himself on young green shoots of tumbleweed and fixing a rack to the back of his new (gifted) bike with a spool of bailing wire. Suelo gets around on a bike or by the flick of his thumb, on discarded spools of bailing wire and other useful throwaways, and on the generosity of others. Money has been absent from his life ever since he gave away the last of his savings twelve years ago, a move he says brought an authenticity and richness to his life that wasn’t there before.
This apparent disconnect between the symptoms of a failed state and the remedies suggested by what is seen to constitute its healthy counterpart makes it difficult to imagine a way out of failed-statehood. We contend that it is necessary to rethink what a failed state is, to understand, at a rather more practical, grassroots level, the drivers of failed or successful societies.
Can we begin to reconceptualize how we interact with Nature and afford it the legal protections that are now available only to people? Along with Bolivia and Ecuador, New Zealand appears to be in the vanguard of this fascinating, welcome trend.
This Spring my farming partners and I found ourselves landless…Last year I wrote an article, “Who Will Feed The People?”, discussing the challenges to small-scale agriculture in the United States, such as lack of equipment, knowledge, financial resources, and markets; the polluted wasteland left behind by conventional farming; increasingly volatile and unpredictable weather patterns brought by Climate Change; and, last but not least, the social barriers: people of the U.S. are by and large uninterested in significant changes to the socio-economic status quo, and resist cutting edge projects.
September 17 (S17) is of course the one-year anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park, a reclaiming of public space that galvanized the political imagination of the country and the world with its proclaimed opposition between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, its prefigurative emphasis on horizontality and mutual aid, and its linking of grievances from climate change to Stop and Frisk to predatory debt. All summer, OWS organizers have poured their energy into preparing for a three-day convergence of “education, celebration and resistance” to mark the anniversary…
This Spring my farming partners and I found ourselves landless…Last year I wrote an article, “Who Will Feed The People?”, discussing the challenges to small-scale agriculture in the United States, such as lack of equipment, knowledge, financial resources, and markets; the polluted wasteland left behind by conventional farming; increasingly volatile and unpredictable weather patterns brought by Climate Change; and, last but not least, the social barriers: people of the U.S. are by and large uninterested in significant changes to the socio-economic status quo, and resist cutting edge projects.
The Earth Orbital Outpost is pleased to report to Galactic Command that the eradication of the intelligent beings (“humans”) inhabiting the planet known as “Earth” is proceeding according to plans. The rapid warming of the planet obtained obtained by the injection of large amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is expected to wipe out most large vertebrates within 40-50 planetary revolutions around the parent star. The planet will be ready for colonization by our species in a few thousand years; when the ecosystem will have been restored. [inspired by a story by Isaac Asimov]
Borrowing a phrase from forester Aldo Leopold, changing one word, I invite you “to think like a tree.” Consider this an exercise in critical, creative, innovative, clear thinking about our dwelling here on this one Earth. Allow that which is hidden and concealed to be revealed to you by those of the other-than-human world.
The US presidential election has taken a predictable turn with the rhetoric du jour that asks, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The implication being that, in the Great Recession, you can’t possibly be better off than you were in the good ol’ days of Dubya Bush and Company.
